The Twilight movie comes out Friday, and we try to figure it out

The Twilight movie is coming out Friday, and if that means nothing to you, you must have been sleeping in a coffin. (That’s a Twilight joke.)

Stephenie Meyer’s four Twilight books are a phenomenon not just to the young adults they’re aimed at, but to adults, especially adult women. They are the biggest book event since Harry Potter — kind of a Da Vinci Code or Bridges of Madison County. You would not go to them for the writing, which is execrable. (James Wolcott in Vanity Fair does a vicious job on it.)

But as Peter Sagal has observed in this space, that is the least of it. Twilight has the lift of a driving dream. I’m a complete snob, and yet I counted the hours until I could get back to my Kindle and read.

The question I’ve asked myself 5,000 times is: Why?

Well, for one thing, Meyer tried to learn from the masters. She says her influences were the Brontes and Jane Austen, and the high gothic romance touches are dead-on. True love impeded, too, is as old as Pyramus and Thisbe — this time the “wall” is his vampireness. You can’t go wrong with a great idea, even if you can’t really write very well.

My friend Nicki says the overriding theme of the books is self-control. (To recap, the story is about a family of gentle, human-blood-abstaining vampires, one of whom falls in love with a human high school girl.) The main characters not only abjure human blood, they even practice abstinence-only birth control, though they are too nouveau Victorian even to frame it in those terms. The characters barely exist below the waist. Conservative social values reign, and rein in.

In America, self-control is the new black president. Barack Obama is nothing if not the king of restraint, message control and not overreaching. His nicotine addiction is almost touching in its blandness. Bill Clinton was all about appetite, but Obama, skinny legs and all, is all about no appetite.

So the books tap into that. Oh, did I mention there are also werewolves? Vampires, werewolves, humans, all in the same stew. You might not have noticed, but in society being human is a lot less important — less of a special class — than it used to be. Just a few years ago, you’d be completely creeped out if somebody said, “My dog is my baby.” Now pretty much everybody says that. (I don’t think it’s a complete accident that I am obsessed with The Killers’ new song Human, where the key lines are “Are we human/ Or are we dancer?” I have no idea what that means, but it means something beneath my radar. )

Vampires and werewolves may be implausible, but a high school kid accepting them unblinkingly is not — these kids have been “mainstreamed” their whole lives. One of the nice things about the books is the overriding theme of tolerance. Let’s raise a glass of elk blood to just getting along!

So there — too much theory for you, not enough questions. Help me, Twilightheads! I know you’re out there somewhere within the sound of my cybervoice.

So a couple of questions:

1. Team Edward or Team Jacob?

2. Why in God’s name would the Cullens go back to high school? It’s hell!

3. Except for some ancillary discussion of the existence of the soul, why are the books so areligious? Not anti. It’s as if religion doesn’t exist, but for that matter, neither does country.